Portable handheld devices (PDAs), such as smart phones, feature phones, portable media players and the like, typically include audio and/or video rendering capabilities to provide access to a variety of entertainment content as well as support social media applications. Such PDAs employ low complexity algorithms due to their limited computational power as well as energy consumption constraints. A variety of tools may be employed by low complexity algorithms such as Music Information Retrieval (MRI) applications which cluster or classify media files. An important musical feature for various MIR applications includes genre and mood classification, music summarization, audio thumbnailing, automatic playlist generation and music recommendation systems using music similarity such as musical tempo. Accordingly, there is a need for a procedure for extracting tempo information from an audio signal from an encoded bit-stream of an audio signal,